Japanese recovery

Japan, at a halt

As seen during 17-hour drives to and from the tsunami-hit north-east of Japan this week, the country appears to have ground to a halt, hit by a mystifying shortage of fuel. Added to rolling power cuts, I predict the consequences for this quarter's growth will be severe. From Tokyo northwards, drivers turn off their engines and park in single file for hours, waiting for their 20-litre rations. Tokyo's police report that the theft of petrol has become widespread, with at least 40 cases of illegal siphoning from car parks around the capital. Petrol-pump attendants along the route north say that the shortages are due to the supplies having been diverted to the stricken coast. But in Miyagi prefecture, scene of much of the devastation, the petrol queues are even longer—miles longer, literally. Drivers wait all day to get to the pump. Worse, the fuel shortage means that supermarkets, convenience stores and other businesses are shut, unable to get fresh products. In evacuation centres for tsunami victims, so-called “food refugees” are joining the queue for a bowl of hot soup—these are people whose homes are still intact, but who have run out of food nonetheless.

And:

This reveals a bureaucratic problem that the crisis has thrown into sharp relief. Japan has no system for overriding petty rules and regulations to cope with an emergency. People trying to deliver supplies to the needy complain about this in a myriad of ways—above all, in access to trunk routes which are still empty (and largely undamaged), save for a few emergency vehicles…and journalists' cars. (The Japanese media, which tend to report slavishly what the government tells them, have been shockingly lax in reporting the food-and-fuel crisis in the afflicted areas.)

The tragedy is that there are any number of efficient retail businesses in Japan desperate to get their shops back open—if nothing else, so that they can sell to the disaster victims. If Japan's establishment were not so bunker-headed and convinced that it knows all the answers, it would have created a war room, brought in experts from the real world, and declared a state of emergency to get the fuel up north. Only now are supplies starting to arrive.

With all due respect, I'm not sure what one gains from this blog post that they wouldn't gain from simply reading Banyan's blog post.

Is there some reason that these quotes from that piece together add value? The banyan blog post is not behind a pay wall and is as equally accessible as this post. It is still in the "Latest Blog Posts" section...

I'm honestly not trying to make a snide remark. I'm just confused as to the repost.

It might be something else too: Japan uses JIT systems much more than we do, meaning they deliver inventory of all types, including to convenience stores, just-in-time rather than stock. One of the first great successes of Japanese manufacturing was large-scale reduction in WIP, meaning work-in-process inventory, meaning the stuff that piles up during the various processes of manufacture, assembly and distribution. WIP covers for slack, the time machines are down, the waits for new materials, shipping delays. Much of their system consists of squeezing that out of production and distribution, pushing that greater efficiency down through the entire system. That has an additional effect; they trade the cost of WIP for cost of running JIT, meaning more employment gained by reducing unnecessary materials, space and financing charges.

When a JIT system takes a hard hit, it flails about, not merely because bureaucrats have closed roads but because JIT on a large scale relies on lots of interactions occurring with regularity. You see this all through Japanese society: even Japanese school field trips tend to be scheduled quite literally to the minute. A WIP system absorbs shocks better because WIP is slack. JIT is a tight ship. I'm not saying WIP would have withstood this magnitude of shock but that JIT is worse in this rare circumstance.

I appreciate for your effort for bringing reader’s attention to the devastating situation of the “food refugees” in the area hit by the earthquake and tsunami, but the article you quoted is totally off the mark.
It is not hoarding of oils by private firms nor Japanese Government’s negligence that have hampered the supply of fuel and other goods to the needy. It is a simple but formidable problem in distribution. Hardest hit areas are hardest area to reach, despite the effort by truck drivers, train operators, and other men and women who have tried in their earnest to restore destroyed transportation system. There is no magical rod to solve this jittering situation overnight. A declaration of a state of emergency, the writer suggested, would not have cleared rubble from roads nor made wrecked gas stations operational.
Of course, what Japanese government has done are far from perfect and has a big room to be improved. The writer of article may have heard such complaints against Japanese government, but he/she clearly failed to capture the whole picture. It is obvious from the fact that the article is “shockingly lax” in ignoring many, for some too many, reports on TV news programs and newspapers on food-and-fuel crisis. It also failed to tell that the trunk routes have been open to trucks that carry rescue goods.
The cheap article based on unprofessional stereotype, and equally unprofessional quotation of it, could hamper to draw useful lessons from this earthquake for future risk management not only in Japan but in the world.